Caral,
dated to 2627 B.C. by the reed bags builders used to carry stones, had
community centers, apartment houses and irrigation

By HENRY FOUNTAIN

NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE

Researchers investigating a Peruvian archaeological site say they have
determined that it is the oldest city yet studied in the Americas, with
a complex, highly structured society that flourished at the same time
that the pyramids were being built in Egypt.

The finding is forcing a re-evaluation of ideas about the rise of
civilizations in the New World, particularly how and when ancient
peoples moved from the coasts, which had reliable ocean food sources, to
inland settlements with less stable supplies of food.

The vast
site, called Caral, is one of about a dozen large sites in the Supe
Valley, 15 miles from the Pacific coast in central Peru, 120 miles north
of Lima. New radiocarbon dating shows that Caral flourished for five
centuries, starting about 2600 B.C., with public architecture (including
six stone platform mounds up to 60 feet high), ceremonial plazas and
irrigation--all signs of a society with strong, centralized leadership.

"Now
we've got to deal with these sites as being the earliest things going on
in South America by hundreds of years," said one of the researchers,
Jonathan Haas, MacArthur curator of anthropology at the Field Museum in
Chicago.

Shelia
Pozorsky, a professor at the University of Texas-Pan American who, with
her husband, Tom, has studied other Andean sites for 30 years, said the
finding helps overturn what has been known as the maritime hypothesis.
This is the idea that complex Andean societies, precursors of the Incas,
evolved from the coast, where reliance on fishing required some level of
social organization, to inland sites, developing fully only when
ceramics appeared around 1800 to 1500 B.C.

"It
makes it more of a quantum leap, rather than a moderately rapid crawl,"
Pozorski said. "Rather than having coastal precursors to inland
complexity, the two areas are developing at the same time."

Another expert in Andean anthropology, Richard L. Burger, director of the
Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale, described the new work as
"the nail in the coffin of the maritime hypothesis."

Haas said
that before the rise of Caral, civilization in the region amounted to a
few small coastal villages, with perhaps a hundred people or so in each,
and smaller bands of hunter-gatherers. By 2700 B.C., he said, several
larger villages began to appear.

"But then
all of a sudden you've got Caral, and probably at least one of its
neighbors," Haas said. "It's bigger by an order of magnitude than
anything before." While it is not yet possible to estimate the
population of Caral--much more archaeological work remains to be
done--Haas said that the number was in the thousands, not hundreds.

Haas
studied Caral with his wife, Winifred Creamer, a professor of
anthropology at Northern Illinois University, and Ruth Shady Solis of
the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Peru. Their paper
dating and describing the site is being published today in the journal
Science.

Caral was
first discovered by archaeologists about 1905, and has been explored
only intermittently. The site's central area covers more than 150 acres
and is dominated by the platform mounds, the largest of which is 450 by
500 feet at the base, and two sunken circular plazas, one of them 150
feet in diameter. There are also remains of several types of
residential structures.

Pottery
has never been found at the site, and its absence would ordinarily
suggest that the civilization existed before 1800 B.C. But Haas said
that many experts believed that the sheer size of the place--and the
level of societal complexity that it implies--meant that it had to be
newer. The consensus, he said, was that "something that big cannot be
that early." So the lack of ceramics, by this way of thinking, was only
an anomaly.

But Haas
and his colleagues felt that the lack of ceramics meant, in fact, that
Caral was a pre-ceramic site. "All three of us had a fundamental belief
that these sites were really early," he said.

The belief was confirmed through the radiocarbon dating of plant fibers
found at the site, including reeds that had been woven into loose sacks,
known as shicra bags.

Those
bags played an essential role in the mound-building process. Caral's
workers filled them with rocks at a hillside quarry, carried them on
their shoulders more than a mile to the construction site and left them,
bag and all, inside the mounds' retaining walls.

Since the
largest mound has a volume of more than 250,000 square yards,
construction required many bags, and many highly organized workers.

"This
site just consumed labor," Haas said, and obviously had a lot to
consume. Caral and nearby sites represented a flourishing,
well-developed society, with enough food, other resources and
organization to build the great mounds. "There's a surplus at these
sites," Haas said, "and it's not going into storage of foodstuffs. It's
going into construction."

The
people of Caral practiced agriculture and, given the and conditions, the
site's size and its location some 30 feet above the flood plain of the
Supe River, they had to have used irrigation. A present-day irrigation
canal nearby is almost certainly on the site of an ancient one, Haas
said.

The
inhabitants grew cotton and vegetables, including squash and beans. But
archaeological work shows that they relied largely on fish and
shellfish, brought from the coast, as their main source of protein. The
remains of clams, sardines and anchovies were found at the site.

Burger
said the fact that much of the food came from the coast only reinforced
the limitations of the maritime hypothesis.

There was
an interdependence between shoreline sites rich in protein and
agricultural sites rich in carbohydrates," Burger said. The Caral work,
he added, shows that rather than a theory that has society developing in
one area, development "has to be thought of in terms of a much larger,
more diverse set of adaptations."